Due to a variety of factors (see entries for: Allergies, I hates them and My life, fuck it) I’ve been on a elimination diet for the past week and change. This elimination diet essentially means I can’t eat… well, anything fun. Basically, if you’ve ever craved it, I can’t eat it.*

This has, actually, been going well. Except for a few moments of hallucinating that R was turning into a walking, talking slice of pepperoni pizza** a la a Bugs Bunny cartoon, I’ve managed to keep the cravings at bay.*** However, I will still, on occasion, bitch to R via text when I feel like I’m going to lose my damn fool mind if I don’t have a giant chunk of lasagna right fucking now. Hence the following text exchange:

M: I would kill someone, anyone, for a taste of cheddar right now.
R: I think that’s an Ol’ Dirty Bastard line.

Well played, R. Well played.

* I almost wish there were a god so I could thank him, her or it for the fact that gin does not contain the allergens I am supposed to avoid. It’s ambrosia with a dash of lime right now.
** Roasted chicken is one of the few foods I can eat, which means I don’t have to be a dry-docked version of the cartoon-guy-starving-in-a-life-raft cliche.
*** I will fully admit that on my calendar Friday, September 28th (the day I can introduce my first food of choice and see if I react) does actually have “Cheeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeese!” written on it, though. God damn I miss dairy.

I’m just going to note here that I had about a five paragraph screed about Whole Foods laced throughout this post, but I deleted it. If you spot any grammar errors please let me know, they’re probably the result of me rooting out the Whole Foods hate in a rush. Unless they’re the usual grammar errors, in which case, yep, I’m still dumb.

After playing the Impossible Questions game this morning, I got lobbed a softball by the book challenge: Highlight a book from your favorite author. But first, a quick story for anyone who doesn’t mind me talking about bras.

This part is for the ladies
Yesterday I had a bit of a dramatic moment when my favorite bra literally ripped in half while I was putting it on.* I hate all my other bras,** so I went to Target to purchase more.*** When I was checking out, I discovered how freaking hilarious it is to watch a young checkout guy try to ring up bras without touching them. At first I thought it was all just a subconscious politeness thing, because who’s really comfortable handling someone else’s underwear even in a brand-new state? But then one of the straps caught on a pair of shoes I was purchasing and dude spent a few seconds shaking the shoe trying get the bra off it before giving up and gingerly dislodging it with one finger. He snapped back like the strap was a fucking snake, and at that point I decided it was not simple politeness but instead an acute case of bra-fear. I kind of wanted to look him in the eye and just repeat yes, those will be touching my boobs on a regular basis until he broke down in tears. Poor Target checkout guy. I hope he doesn’t actually suffer from some sort of bizarre bra-phobia, because he’d be screwed what with our societal obsession with breasts everywhere.

On to the ChallengeOkay, now that I’ve gotten a story peripherally about boobs out of my head, every one of you should go read The Secret History. Donna Tartt has only written one other book, The Little Friend, (which I won’t link to because I hated it as much as I loved The Secret History) but The Secret History is good enough to classify her as one of my favorite authors.**** So there’s my recommendation. I don’t even want to attempt any sort of synopsis since it’s so good if you just dive in blind, but I will warn people that it is solidly literary fiction. If that’s not your cup of tea, you’ve received fair warning. For everyone else: read it, and I hope you enjoy.

* In case you were wondering how, the little part that holds the cups together just gave up the ghost, all in one go. I’m just glad it happened while I was dressing, not while I was out in public.
** Which is probably why my favorite broke.
*** Dear Bra Enthusiasts: Yes I know I buy cheap bras and my breasts will hate me forever and I will look lumpy and unshapely and do I know I’m probably not even wearing the right size?! How about I got to Nordstrom, get fitted, and drop $100 on a fancy bra when I can afford to? Thanks in advance for the concern.
**** Because she’s in such illustrious company.

I like you. I really do, but alas, there are some ongoing issues in our relationship I feel need to be addressed before things can go any further. It’s nothing I wasn’t warned about – all your other readers all over the internet have some similar complaints – but I thought that you and I had a special relationship. I’m beginning to realize just how wrong I was. So please, bear with me as I bring up some of the things that are bugging me. I hope you won’t take this as an attack. I only have our future in mind.

1. White and off-white drizzly stuff never looks good in a photographI know it’s all artsy to drizzle condiments all over a dish when you’re plating it but white or off-white drizzles make me think of two things: pus and semen. Not pleasant when reading about food. If it’s chunky, I don’t think of food, I think of chunky pus or semen.* Even worse. And don’t be all clever and start mixing herbs into things. It just makes me wonder why someone has mixed otherwise good greenery into one of the aforementioned bodily fluids.

This is really the food porn equivalent of asking your boyfriend how his mom is mid-sex. Why don’t we just agree that all white condiments should be in a bowl off to the side?

1-a.As a corollary to the above, please be aware that nut butters look like baby poop
I think this is self-explanatory.

2. You don’t need 27 different photos of your plated foodOne, maybe two, photos are all I need of a finished dish. Any more and I’m just banging my head against my desk wailing about how you let that delicious sounding meal get cold so you could take photos for your blog. Real life before internet.

2-a. If you’re not a photographer, your photographs are passable at best. It’s okay.
You’re probably not aware of how your fancy camera works. It’s okay, I’m really there for the recipes. Hell, I’m a shitty photographer too – that’s why I don’t have a bunch of photos on my blog. It’s fine. So please stop attempting artsy angles on your photos of Roast Leg of Lamb with Potatoes Dauphine; you’re not even fooling me, a self-professed bad photographer. Also, when your pictures suck please don’t blame it on the lighting or the camera. Poor workman, blaming tools, blah blah blah.

3. Bacon does not belong in everythingBacon is delicious, but it’s getting old. I can’t believe I have to say this, because bacon is to omnivores who love cooking as Monty Python and the Holy Grail is to people who were nerds in high school – it’s funny, but for fuck’s sake you’re almost thirty, you should be beyond quoting it once an hour, and everyone who knows you has informed you of this fact, yet you persist. Like all good things prone to abuse, you need to use bacon sparingly. Bacon macaroni and cheese? We can talk. But things like bacon smoothies, bacon-flavored beer, bacon-topped doughnuts, and chocolate covered bacon are really pushing it. Hell, just deep fry some bacon covered bacon and eat it so we can all just shut the hell up about bacon for a while.

4. Not every food is improved by being made into pizza formMaybe I’m a minority but I do not think that many of things I love to eat are better when put on dough and baked at a high temperature, possibly with cheese. Everything that would be good as a pizza has been tried. And throwing the major components of another non-bread-based dish on a pizza is over the line. The rule of thumb is this: is this something that I would eat hot on top of a bread product? If the answer is yes, pizza your little heart out. If the answer is no, either make the dish you’re thinking of as it is usually made or try again. Besides, there are so many variations and so many different traditional toppings-on-flatbread dishes that you’re not going to lack for great flavors and unique tastes even if you avoid the typical American-style pizza toppings. I love me some pizza. I just don’t love crap like spicy tuna roll pizza with wasabi-soy-tomato sauce. That sounds nasty.

5. Anything you can think of that would make any of the above points untrue has some other flaw, so you’re still wrong about itAn example: yogurt is a drizzly off-white substance frequently used to top cereals or berries or things like that. In large quantities when it’s left in its usual thicker state, as in parfaits, photographs of it do not immediately make people retch. The problem is, if your food blog contains photos of large quantities of thick yogurt on things, you’re either: 1) obscuring the cereal or other dish you’ve made and posted with a big ol’ blob of yogurt, negating the point of the picture** or 2) you’re photographing yogurt alone and your blog is officially a waste of everyone’s time. Yogurt thinned out and drizzled? See point 1 again, and read it slowly this time.

6. Oh yeah, about your healthy dessert that tastes just like the real thing…
Quit lying to me, we both know it doesn’t. I don’t even need to make it, I can see that your chocolate chip cookie dough contains neither chocolate nor dough. Do you think I’m five and can be tricked into eating broccoli if it’s mashed up with maple syrup, cherry pie filling and flour? When I want something healthy I’ll eat a salad or a nice veggie filled stir-fry. When I want a piece of cake I want a fucking piece of cake, not some terrible mix of reduced-fat non-chocolate, applesauce and regret. Honestly, it’s enough to make me want to stick my head in the oven.

There. That wasn’t so bad, was it? I mean, I think we can really work on this relationship and…

Wait, what was that? You’ve heard this all before and no one understands you? Your readers are “mean” and don’t let you explore your art? What fucking art, half the time you use a god-damned box mix for your cakes! Oh, that was below the belt? Well, how about this: I’d rather take cooking lessons from that vodka-soaked cheerleader Sandra Lee and that shrill harpy Rachel Ray for the rest of my life than continue this relationship. Now I know why half the internet bitches about you behind your back. You’re off my Google Reader.

And no, we can’t just be friends.

MJ

* My apologies to anyone eating while reading that last little bit.
** But I’ve taken a few photos of the food without the topping and people need to see it with the yogurt topping! You’re in direct violation of point 2. Shut up and eat your meal. See? This is what I mean when I say you’re still wrong.

Today, I’m supposed to name a book I can recite or quote. The answer is “way too fucking many.” This whole book challenge is starting to make me feel like that dude from Blind Melon.

Instead of listing half the books on my bookshelf, I’ll instead distill it to two books. The serious option is Catch-22. The comedy option is 99% of Havelock Vetinari’s lines in the Discworld series.

Catch-22 is awesome, amazingly quotable and pretty much the perfect book for anyone with a black sense of humor and the deep belief that warfare is one of the most inane and nonsensical things humanity has ever come up with.* I can’t really say much about it other than if you have not read it, please do. If you did and didn’t like it, I don’t know what to say to you because my jaw is on the floor.

As for the comedy option, well, Havelock Vetinari is pretty much the perfect not-quite-benevolent dictator and everyone should know what he thinks about everything. Which is impossible, because you can’t actually understand how Vetinari thinks. He’s just that good. So we all lose, and Vetinari wins.** Which is exactly what he planned from the beginning. Fuck! I told you he was good.

On a completely non-book related side note, I’m currently drinking a glass of mead, which is odd. It’s the drink of the Vikings – the fucking Vikings – so if you’re anything like me and R you pictured mead, before you knew how it was made,*** as being some sort of thick, bready, stouty beer, the sort of thing you could practically live off of for weeks on end. Instead, it tastes like white wine with some honey stirred in. So basically the Vikings, men of men, conquerors of conquerors, and despoilers of Dark Age coastal towns everywhere, sat around getting shitfaced on something that tastes like a beverage forty year old women drink on a Girl’s Night Out while they laugh about how naughty they are. This world is full of surprises.

Edited for idiotic spelling mistakes.

* I’m including reality television and blogging in this category, so trust me when I say that in my personal assessment of humanity war has some serious contenders for inanity.
** Yes, in the Contest of Awesome we all just got our pants beaten off by a fictional character.
*** Fermented honey, if you didn’t know and were wondering.

Next up on the Thirty Day Book Challenge: “What book would you most like to live in?” or “MJ says to hell with the spirit behind the book challenge, yet again.”* In all honesty, there’s not a single book I’d like to live in. Why? Because books are written so the characters can have exciting things happen to them, and the vast majority of the time those exciting things suck a bag of dicks. Sure, you may have a happy ending, but going through months or years of utter crap in order to get to it? No thank you. I’ll take my slightly boring but overall stable and pleasant life over that any day. Besides, any time something happens you’re bound to think “Oh shit, here comes Narrative Causality again.”

Plus, think of the lives people lead in book-land. There might be some awesome aspects to it, but the bad aspects are really shitty. Let’s review the pros and cons by genre, if you will:

Fantasy Pros: If you’re down with fantasy you can do magic, wield a weapon like a champ, and have an impossible resistance to all physical injury.**
Fantasy Cons: The inevitable evil wizard, tyrant-king, or gaggle of impossible to kill magical beings are hell-bent on fucking your shit up. Also, if you’re a woman, there are no bras not made of leather or chain-mail and you’re probably going to put someone’s eye out with those things.

Science Fiction Pros: You’re probably on a different planet, which is kinda cool. You also have unlimited awesome technology, usually.
Science Fiction Cons: You’re locked in a struggle with cyborgs, androids, cyborg androids, or aliens. If you’re not in one of those situations, your government is certainly trying to kill you. There’s a decent chance that you’re surrounded by men who think sex with aliens is a healthy and enjoyable pastime.

Classics Pros: You already know what’s going on in the world because you have some knowledge of history, so that’s fun. If you luck out and don’t get something like Heart of Darkness or American Revolutionary classics you may be an aristocrat, which, if you can put up with the concept of consciously and continuously oppressing people, means you’re reasonably well-fed and housed.
Classics Cons: If you did luck out and wind up an aristocrat, you’re still going to lose all your money or be lynched by angry peasants, so be ready for that. If you’re not in one of the aristocrat-filled classics, you’re probably at war somewhere or seriously fucking poor and oppressed. You’ll also find no one gives a shit about the world being unfair,*** whereas at least in the modern First World people pretend to when others are looking. Depending on how much you remember from your high-school history classes, you may be imprisoned or killed horribly for being a witch. Also, do you know what doctors did to people back then? Hope you don’t get sick. You will anyway.

Literary Fiction Pros: There’s a good chance you’re a special snowflake who is really smart, really perceptive, or really talented. You stand a good chance of having or eventually obtaining an upper-middle-class life.
Literary Fiction Cons: If you’re a woman, you’ll probably be sexually abused or have your husband leave you. Your marriage is inevitably a wreck and your kids each have one-way tickets to Delinquent Land. Also, regardless of gender, you are so, so, so very depressed.

Chick Lit Pros: You always have plenty of money for frivolous things even if you can’t pay your rent. You probably have a Nice Title job that you don’t really need to be at often, and you live in an exciting city. There’s a good chance you’re pretty hot and a lot of men want to sleep with you. If you’re not really hot, don’t worry, the hot guy is still going to want to sleep with you anyway because you’re a special snowflake. Five will get you ten that you marry someone with money, power and a house on the French Riviera.
Chick Lit Cons: You are so incredibly stupid none of the pros matter.

Romance Pros: You’ll wind up having a lot of sex.
Romance Cons: All the sex is with Fabio.****

I could provide more examples, but I think I’ve made my point. I’ll stick to the real world, thanks.

*Despite my oh, hell no reaction to some of the questions, I am quite enjoying this little exercise and will continue. Plus, I like some of the future questions a lot.
** I’ve made this observation before, but why do fantasy authors always think getting sliced up, burned badly, jumping off of really tall buildings, or falling from galloping horses are minor injuries? Almost every hero or heroine in a fantasy book has the same “it’s cool bro, I’ll walk it off” reaction to injuries that would cripple or kill anyone. It’s just a flesh-wound, indeed.
*** In other words, prepare to be kicked a lot, for no reason.
**** Fabio brings up conflicting emotions for me because on one hand the whole duck-rollercoaster incident is hilariously weird and on the other hand I feel like a terrible person for laughing at his pain. Poor Fabio.

I can hear all ten of you breathing a sigh of relief because I’m not posting one of those stupid Endless Books You Hate or Love or Love to Hate or Whatever Challenge posts. Don’t worry, my goal with this post is to punish your relief with awful clothing. This way, you’ll be happy when I put one up later today. On the plus side, you get to feel superior to me clothing-wise, so technically I’m boosting your self-esteem and you win in this exchange. You’re welcome.

Anyone who is attracted to women might want to take a deep breath before viewing the picture below. I know, it’s almost too much hotness to handle.

These are probably the ugliest pants in the world. At least, they’re the ugliest pants owned by someone with enough money to purchase another pair of pants and who can, therefore, be discriminating in her choice of pants. To answer the burning question in everyone’s mind, yes, that is me, which means I am the owner of the hideous pants. What’s even scarier is I’m wearing them and willingly posting a picture of myself wearing them on the internet. For the record, I’m not completely shameless. You’ll notice my face isn’t in the picture so technically I can always deny it, though I think the pants are pretty much identifiable everywhere.* As always, there’s a story behind these, but I’m going to post another couple of pictures so we can fully appreciate their awfulness.

Minus the awkward crotch-shot

Where do I even start with the wrongness? I know you’re all saying “the pattern, my god, the pattern,” but oh, there’s more. It’s like one of those “how many things are wrong in this picture?” comics from Highlights for Kids magazine. Fortunately for you I’ve had these pants for an embarrassingly long time, so you don’t have to damage your eyes by trying to pinpoint all the issues. Here’s a quick marked-up picture of the worst stuff to help you out:

Let’s also zoom in real close on the print, just for shits and giggles.

Agh! Snowflakes, flowers, hearts (green? what? are the hearts infected?), squiggly lines… Purple snowflakes? Okay, I have to look away, I can’t even put a proper sentence together looking at this.

The story of the pants is not terribly dramatic. It really boils down to my mom bought them for me and gave them to me for Christmas a few years ago. While an eye-rapingly bright and gaudy pair of pajama pants isn’t a typical Christmas present from her, I should have seen this one coming. You see, my mother thinks I live in dour colors. She’s right about this – I wear lots of black, brown, gray, and darker jewel tones. I don’t wear these because I’m some sort of half-goth like she seems to think, but because I’m ash blond and light-eyed, with skin that has a tendency to look fire-engine red when I’m dressed in anything bright.** Bright colors are bad on me. Bad. Unfortunately for me my mother is almost the opposite in coloring, dark brown hair and eyes, with a very non-ruddy skin tone – in other words, a person who looks great in bright colors -and she just doesn’t understand my resistance to all things bright and cheery. I’m even further in the doghouse clothing-wise because I don’t particularly like the way most prints look on me, which is apparently just not okay with mom. The upshot of her being absolutely convinced I’d look fantastic in colors, prints, and colorful prints is that she winds up buying me bright, printed clothing a lot. Most of the time it’s perfectly fine stuff that I’d willingly wear in public, like a bright-blue shirt – not the most flattering for me, but whatever. I can deal, it’s a present for Chrissakes.

Unfortunately I’ve been steadily resisting purchasing colored or patterned clothing for about ten years now, and I think something finally shorted in her head when she bought these – something that made her decide that combining ALL the prints and ALL the colors into one garment would kill about a thousand birds with one stone when it came to my poor clothing choices. And so she went with the most color and pattern she could get on one garment, and I was gifted some ass-ugly pants.***

Now, a more important question is: why the everloving Christ did I keep the pants? At first I did the “oh mom, thanks!” thing because, well, she’s my mom and I love her and appreciate it when she tries to help me. Then I felt them and, shit, they’re flannel. I love flannel pajamas. It’s a horrible weakness, but I just associate flannel pajamas with nice chilly winters and fireplaces and all kinds of awesome and at the time I was way too broke to afford purchasing a better, less insane pair of flannel pajama pants.**** So I kept them and shamefully wore them to bed while reveling the warmth and fuzziness of my horrible pants. But the real blow was this, which it truly pains me to admit: They’ve grown on me.

It’s kind of like pugs. The first time some people see a pug they recoil because god damn, that is one ugly animal. Then they see them a couple of more times and they’re kind of funny in a really weird, snuffly, stunted sort of way, and soon enough they’re fucked because they start actually liking pugs and thinking they’re cute.***** That’s kind of what happened to me with these pants: I now unironically like them, fucked up though that may be. They’re comfortable. They’re fuzzy and warm. They’re hideous as shit, but in a way that makes me feel like I’m striking a blow against female stereotypes. I can wear these pants****** and feel like “Yes, my pants are horrible but I like them. Deal with it because I Dress for Me!” I’m sold.

The only road block I’ve faced has been, as you may have predicted, R. He hates these pants with the passion of a thousand fiery suns. When I wear them, his reaction is something along the lines of “Oh god take those fucking things off. No. I meant take them off and put on a better pair of pants for fuck’s sake.” While this is a common reaction whenever The Pants make an appearance, I think R best summed his feelings up best that fateful morning when I first unwrapped them and he told me, “you know, I think this is your mom’s way of telling us she’s just not ready for grandkids yet.”

And with that, I’ll repost my original picture so you guys can see just how wrong he is. Too sexy? Oh, but I must.*******

No, no. Too sexy!

* Note to self: destroy terrible pants prior to embarking on illustrious and ill-fated bank-robbing career.
** I once accidentally dyed my hair strawberry blonde in high school (ashy hair + a warmer color dye = RED, as I sadly found out) and I looked perpetually sunburned until I dyed it back to a less-red color.
*** My father actually visibly cringed when I opened them on Christmas morning.
**** For all you smartasses thinking “who needs flannel in Florida?” well, you just shut your dirty, logical mouth.
***** I’m still 100% in the god damn that’s an ugly animal cringing phase. Then again, I own these pants so my judgement is in question.
****** Only in the house. Feminism only makes you okay with hideous pants to a certain extent.
******* If you don’t get it please see this. Specifically, pay attention at 3:14.

Today’s Challenge question: “What book made you laugh out loud?” I consider this a great question because the book I’m going to highlight here is a book I’ve never even read. Take that, Book Challenge!

Of all the books, ever, I have to say the book that makes me laugh the most is Twilight by Stephanie Meyers. I don’t find this book so much funny-funny as sad-funny, if you get my drift. I’ll reiterate my prior statement: I’ve never so much as read the blurb on the back cover, but I know enough about it* that the sheer existence of this book makes me laugh my damn ass off for multiple reasons. Maybe it’s slightly hysterical laughter, but it’s still laughter so I’m counting it. Before I jump into why I find Twilight hilarious, I’ll go ahead and provide the obligatory mocking: SPARKLE! MARY SUE BELLA! VAMPIRES KNOW THEY LOVE YOU WHEN THEY WANT TO KILL YOU! TEAM INTERCHANGEABLE, ABUSIVE AND FUCKED UP MAN-CHILD OF YOUR CHOICE!

Okay, now that I’ve gotten that out of the way, let’s focus on the hilarity that this is a (HA) cultural phenomenon. Where to start? It’s pretty much every teen movie ever. Teenage girl who moves to new city and suddenly all the boys are in luuuurve with her? Check! The hot guy she’s into is unbearably weird and fucked up, but because this is fiction it’s okay? Check! Girl does idiotic things (like become a member of the fucking undead) because she and boy have twoo wuv fowever? Check! It’s pathetic, but in a way I’m so used to in fiction aimed at teenagers that I just have to laugh. Secondly, I love the fact that Bella waits until marriage to both bone EdcobJacward Edward and to become a vampire. Oh, the metaphors. Someone noted upon reading the series that it was basically hundreds of pages of Mormons not fucking, and I think that sounds like an accurate description. Also, that girl is eighteen, married, had a kid, and, from what I can gather, does not plan to do anything else with her long-ass un-life than be with her sparkle crazytown husband. In what world is this a good role model? Yes, I get that some people marry young. I get that some people have kids young. They’re not for me, but different strokes, hey? But it sounds like she has no plans to do anything else. That is what I find fucked up. Even the youngest married and youngest-to-reproduce people I’ve met had some sort of plan or goal in life other than “I have married and babied.” Because, you know, they’re not completely one-dimensional. Oh man, there are just so many reasons I find this book stupidly ridiculous.

Also, I laugh at this book because, once upon a time, R used an online writing style analyzer and just plugged in several paragraphs of “herp derp.” His closest match, according to said analyzer, was Stephanie Meyer. I don’t know how accurate that is, but thank you, writing style analyzer, for making me laugh so hard I damn near pissed myself.

I’ll leave you guys with one more observation about Twilight: I find the mere idea of this series sad, pathetic, and ultimately hilarious, and I have read and enjoyed Anne Rice.** Anne Rice is bad. She practically invented fucked up sexy vampires with questionable morality. If that’s not a giant fucking warning sign, I don’t know what is.

Oh, you guys wanted a real answer to the question? Okay. I read a lot of comedy,*** and some of the favorites are Terry Pratchett (particularly Small Gods, Good Omens and The Watch series), Douglas Adams, P.G. Wodehouse, and Bill Bryson (Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid, Neither Here Nor Thereand Notes from a Small Island are my favorites). Yes, I read a lot of British authors, so sue me.****

Oh yeah: SPARKLE! Say it enough and it starts to sound like either a kitchen implement or a German pastry. “Honey, could you pass me the sparkle, please?”

* Yes, I actually do know the plot and have heard a lot about the books. I do have one good friend***** who lists Twilight as her guilty pleasure and has told me all about it. I don’t need to read them to mock them, so save it if that’s what you’re going to pick on.
** I swear to you that I also read good books, like classics and stuff. They’re just not as fun to talk about on a blog as fantasy and the other pulpy or terrible stuff I read. Promise.
*** Bloggerspeak for “my sense of humor, it is so awesome.”
**** I don’t get the general belief a lot of Americans seem to hold that British comedy is sophisticated, at least not the British comedies you can find in the US. The British humor that’s trickled into this country is based on painful awkwardness, being viciously mean to people, the aristocracy being twits, and men in drag. It can be funny as hell, and I love it, but I wouldn’t claim it’s particularly sophisticated.******
***** A measure of how much I avoid Twilight is that I refused to go see the movie with her. This is my best friend, one of the few people on the planet whose happiness means as much to me as my own does, a person I would give up a kidney for without a second thought. I will not, however, see Twilight with her to save her from going to a movie by herself. Maybe this means I’m a bad friend. I think it means I have some standards.
****** Yes, there is sophisticated British comedy, I know, it just isn’t mainstream enough in the US to be what people talk about when they talk about British comedy. Don’t get your panties in a bunch. Also, I know Bryson’s American.

Today’s question for the Thirty Day Book Challenge is “What is your least favorite book?” This is infinitely easier to answer than yesterday’s nearly impossible favorite book question, simply because I define my least favorite book as “whichever book I read most recently that bored the ever-loving shit out of me.” Unfortunately it leaves me with not too much to post about, because I’ve already panned The Magicians on this site before.

I will, however, give a very brief summary of why I find this book’s “critical acclaim” insufferable: Lev Grossman was in the comparative lit program at Yale, and basically did all-but-the-dissertation, then he went on to be a book critic at TIME. He writes a novel that very heavy-handedly borrows from C.S. Lewis and J.K. Rowling, calls the borrowed stuff an homage, and publishes it. The book is, while not terribly written and therefore unpublishable, not good. However, being in the right literary circles and being connected to book critics across the US mean it is hyped by critics, becomes a NYT best-seller, and is loved for being “innovative” by people who ordinarily would never touch a fantasy novel without a ten-foot pole and a whole hell of a lot of antiseptic. This frustrates me as a person who enjoys a good fantasy novel: while many fantasy novels are steaming piles of shit, there are excellent fantasy novels in existence. They’re just not usually written by the type of people who are deeply involved in the Ivy literary circles,* so they’re lumped in with the shit and treated as unimportant or uninteresting unless they’re really popular. The ones that are interesting or important seem to automatically become non-fantasy or sci-fi in the eyes of the literary world, or worse, are heralded as “yes this is fantasy, but it’s not, you know, fantasy.” I am currently giving one of the biggest rolleyes imaginable, just thinking about it.

* Here’s a hint: if English departments in colleges only have the “wacky” and young professors cover fiction like sci-fi and fantasy, it will remain solely genre in the eyes of many.** I’m getting tired of hearing authors who write novels that include fantasy or science fiction elements, or, hell, are straight-up science fiction or fantasy, deny that they’d ever have involvement in that crap.
** Well, second from the bottom. Harlequin Romance, anyone?

A few days ago while in a fit of drunken idiocy,* I asked Amanda over at amandatheatheist if I could get in on the Thirty Day Book Challenge she recently posted. She encouraged me, so the next morning I read the list of topics for all thirty days and found that, to my dismay, Day 1’s question is “What is your favorite book?” Well, fuck me, why didn’t someone say we were playing the Impossible Questions Game?

Normally, when faced with something I want to post that just isn’t coming to me I just post something else until it comes together. But you see, I love books and I read an obscene amount. Asking me to name my favorite book is kind of like stealing a sock from a vampire:** panic, confusion and horror overwhelm until the matter is settled. And so I’ve found myself utterly unable to write anything for the past few days. I would sit at my computer and have a crippling feeling of panic wash over me because I had not decided what my favorite book was yet.

Instead of actually attempting to think about it and come up with a passable answer, I delayed and procrastinated with the best of them. I read things. I winged it in the kitchen and made a damned fine chicken pot pie, one of the best I’ve had. I spent a number of hours reading archives from blogs I’ve recently found. I grocery shopped, pulled a few extra hours at work, signed up for an extra shift at my volunteer job. Two things have broken my silence. The first is that I have not posted since Tuesday and I don’t want to avoid inadvertently kill my blog through sheer indecisiveness about books, so I need to post to get the ball rolling again.*** Dammit. The second is that I recently read a forum thread titled “What’s the strangest way someone you’ve known has died?” which means I can’t leave my house for fear I will be electrocuted by a faulty utility line, catapulted in an hilarious but ultimately fatal way into a bed full of poisonous spiders on a passing truck, or be chewed up by a combine harvester that just happens to be running down the sidewalk in my nowhere-near-a-farm neighborhood. Which means the internet is my only form of entertainment at the moment, and this has forced my hand. So, in advance I am sorry to all the books I did not pick. You are much loved, too, little bound collections of paper.

Okay. How to pick a favorite book? So hard, so, so hard. I value books on so many scales: entertainment value, the ability to make you think at least a little, creativity, re-readability… The list can go on. As I can never actually commit myself to just one favorite book, I thought the best thing to do was pick something that ranks highest, on average, for the things I value in a book. The oddest thing to me is that when I tally the front-runners, the one that comes out ahead isn’t actually a book, but a graphic novel collection. Okay then. I’ll go with Neil Gaiman’s The Sandman.

I can hear a lot of people groaning – it’s a comic book, it’s a fantasy comic book, yada yada yada. But dude, it’s so good. And so clever. And so impossible to explain to anyone who hasn’t read it, but I’ll try. The short synopsis is that it follows the Lord of Dreams, who is referred to by many names and isn’t so much the ruler of the dream world but more the actual embodiment of dreaming, as he emerges from a century long imprisonment. This imprisonment sets off a chain reaction including but not limited to a major conflict with his sibling Desire, Lucifer beginning to question the necessity of running Hell, and the attempted destruction of the Dreaming. It’s highly readable, with stories ranging from the interesting to the outright weird. It’s very clever, incorporating about a million myths and stories (my favorite is by far the Shakespeare subplot) almost effortlessly. The world-behind-reality that Gaiman set up is incredibly interesting and unique. It’s also got the added bonus of being off-the-wall enough about things we take for granted, such as reality, mortality, and our control on the world around us, that you see stories and narratives in a very different light. It ultimately becomes an homage to story telling of all sorts, which is the reason I picked it for today. What better than a book that’s about how vital stories are? Even though I am blurring the rules a bit, as it’s a collection of ten bound graphic novel collections instead of just one book. But whatever. It’s one story, and that’s what counts.

Tomorrow I’ll be diving into day two. If you’re not interested in the Thirty Day Book Challenge I’ll be posting other stuff pretty regularly as well, but I’m not self-hosted so there’s no hope of creating a separate RSS feed for the Book Challenge. Sorry. “Thirty Day Book Challenge: Day [Number]” will be in the title for anything addressing the Challenge, and if the post includes anything other than Book Challenge material there will be something else in the title as well. Feel free to mark as read if you don’t want to read it. The Challenge will be over on March 31.

*Other highlights from MJ’s Reel of Drunken Idiocy include: starting this blog, majoring in Latin, deciding working in non-profits was a great career move, just about anything I’ve posted on any internet forum, ever.
** I’ve got a surprising number of similarities to vampires. I’m pale, I’m happier in dark or dim lighting, I tend to recoil from Catholic priests, and I’m pretty sure a stake through the heart would kill me.****
*** Though I know most people probably wouldn’t notice the radio silence for a while, I delude myself into thinking everyone’s on the edge of their seat, just waiting for my next post.
**** Also,vampire fruit are a thing you guys. According to the font of all wisdom, Wikipedia, vampire pumpkins in Bulgaria are identifiable because they say “brrl brrl brrl!” and then shake themselves. Daaawwww. That is the cutest damned vampire I’ve ever heard of.

I don’t really like kids. To be blunt, I think that before the age of about twelve they’re all a bunch of wee sociopaths and between thirteen and around sixteen (at an absolute minimum, some never pass this phase) they’re just assholes with no real excuse.* Sure, in brief doses they can be amusing and even cute, but there’s about a five-minute window and then I’m over it. By and large, we stick to a fairly simple arrangement: they stay away from me, and I don’t threaten to break anyone’s shins. It’s worked swimmingly so far.

That said, I do work in a toy store, which is both better and worse than you can imagine for someone who just doesn’t really like children. Better because I’m surrounded by a bunch of other child-hating misanthropes** and worse because I, you know, have to be near kids all day. But for the most part their parents take care of them. I only have to pay attention to anyone under the age of eighteen when someone thinks it’s a wonderful idea for little Bobby to pay for a twenty-dollar item entirely in piggy bank quarters.***

As you may imagine, I’ve seen countless instances of terrible behavior from children. Interestingly enough, I’ve gone from the type of childless person who gives a parent with a screaming child the stink eye to the type that kinda sympathizes. Like I said: kids are tiny little sociopaths. Their entire existence is essentially a study in narcissism, you have to feel for someone who deals with that all day. I also don’t entirely blame the parents for having them. Hormones make people do idiotic things, and we as a species are almost cripplingly under the sway of our offspring.

I’ll also note that, on the whole, parents at our store deal with misbehaving children like fucking champs. Tantrum? The child disappears.**** Crying jag? Parents shut that shit down. I don’t have an issue with the vast majority of parents.

But.

About twice a month I see parents parents who, as their child throws the biggest, screamiest, messiest, cryingest tantrum in the middle of our rather busy store, replete with kicking, flailing, and knocking shit over, just walk away and continue to shop as if that shit is not going down. To be perfectly clear, I’m not talking about taking a few steps back and pretending to be unfazed as the child runs out of steam, or “ignoring” the kid so that they get the picture that Tantrums Don’t Work On Mommy or Daddy. I’m also not talking about that dazed behavior that parents occasionally sink into when their kids are having a bad day (and believe me, I am intimately familiar with the terrified deer-in-headlights look overwhelmed, fried mothers and fathers of grumpy toddlers have) but simply wandering off and leaving their kid without a backward glance, as if he or she were just playing on the floor. Usually, they murmur something like “oh, that’s nice dear,” and peruse the aisles far enough away that the kid is not even in peripheral vision any longer. And those parents? Those parents I judge. Oh, I judge them long and hard. It just seems so… neglectful.***** Do the ignoring-the-tantrum thing, keeping an eye on the kid while they wind down. Take the kid outside. Hell, plead with your three year old as if he or she actually had the ability to give a shit about something other than his own wants, I don’t care. But your child freaking out on the floor and you’re not even registering it? That just seems wrong.

However, I have no kids. I know nothing about parenting, or children, or… anything really, involving dealing with people under the age of about fifteen. I’m the youngest sibling, and the youngest of all my cousins, and only one friend of mine had a younger sibling when I was growing up. None of my friends have reproduced so far, at least not any that I see regularly. So the reality check is this: do these parents sound as neglectful as I seem to think they are, or am I just being one of those judgy childless people?

Regardless of whether I’m off the mark on that or not, I will just say on a related note that leaving your kid in their poopy diaper the whole hour you’re in the store needs to fucking stop right now. Forget crop dusting, that’s all out biological warfare.

*What, the nerves in your frontal lobe haven’t fully developed? Well in my day, our frontal lobe nerves developed by ten years old, and they had to work two jobs to support a family. While walking to school in the snow. Uphill. Both ways.
** Parents coming across this are saying, “Not the employees at my local toy store! They’re so sweet to my kids!” To which I reply: Yes. The employees at your local toy store as well. It’s a shame what deceptions otherwise guileless adults will perpetuate for slightly above minimum wage.
*** Here’s a hint: hit the bank before the toy store and teach little Bobby the wonders of paper money. We’ll thank you when we don’t need to roll quarters in order to close the fucking register drawer.
**** Hopefully not permanently.
***** Using the “inattentive” meaning of neglectful, not the legal meaning. But I can see that 911 call going down poorly for everyone involved.